


Pro Patria Mori

by pachemuchka



Series: Sisyphus Observed [3]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, Historical Hetalia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:15:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24671434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pachemuchka/pseuds/pachemuchka
Summary: At the height of the Great War, Ivan has a conversation with a Russian soldier.
Series: Sisyphus Observed [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1779892
Kudos: 17





	Pro Patria Mori

**Author's Note:**

> Part 3 of the Sisyphus Observed series! Apologies this took so long, I'm doing online classes so that's occupying most of my time. Hope you enjoy!

_25 December 1916;_ _Tīrelis Swamp, Latvia, Russian Empire_

Ivan stumbled through the doorway, gripping its rotten wooden frame tightly to steady himself. A bullet whistled from somewhere behind him. He instinctively threw himself forward, landing face-first into a snowdrift. Somewhere, he heard German being spoken. Ivan waited for it to get closer, but it never did. Breathing heavily, he pushed himself up from the snow, arms shaking both from the weight of his body and from the cold.

He scanned the hut briefly. It looked as though it had belonged to peasants once, but they had left long ago. Maybe evicted by the war, maybe not. The only people who had been here lately were soldiers. Clearly, they had thought the little hut would be a good place to hide out and maybe find some food, too. Their footprints and cigarette butts littered the floor. But most importantly to Ivan, so were their empty tin cans.

His stomach registered them before his eyes, and Ivan almost lunged forward to grab one, scrutinizing it to see if there were any contents left. He swiped his finger along the inside and came back with nothing. He did it to the next one, and the next one, and the one after that. But every time, his glove came back clean. Nevertheless, Ivan shoved his finger into his mouth with the hope that maybe he’d get some kind of taste. But he tasted only snow as the little flakes melted into water inside of his mouth.

Now, he was both hungry and disappointed. His stomach growled, an empty fist of hunger gripping him from the inside out. He hardly thought like a person anymore, much less like a soldier in the Tsar’s army. He thought like an animal desperately looking for food. But then again, people were nothing more than animals who could walk, talk, and think, weren’t they?

Ivan could still think, at least. He thought about the heavy losses his men had taken that morning. Maybe those who were still alive would receive some of their rations. The fallen wouldn’t need them, after all. He thought about how his horse had been shot out from under him. Under normal circumstances, he would weep for her. Losing a horse as a cavalryman was akin to losing one’s legs. No, he had enough to weep for now. If Ivan wept for every person he had lost, he would be weeping for a hundred years. He was only upset that he couldn’t eat the horse because the Germans had been closing in on their position. Now, some Fritz was probably eating his beloved mount instead.

He muttered under his breath and settled against a wall, hiding from the wind which blew through the broken windows. Now that he knew there was no food to be found, Ivan gave the hut a proper look-over. The walls were grimy and one corner was blackened by smoke where a furnace had stood. In another a little Icon depicting Saint Michael hung from a thread, his hand raised to display the sign of the cross. In the middle of the floor was a mound. A human shaped mound covered in snow.

He stared at it for a moment. It didn’t strike Ivan in any particular way. He was desensitized to the dead, bodies weren’t uncommon in a war, after all. He saw them when he woke up and when he went to sleep—sometimes that sleeping was done beside them. Usually, they looked much more gruesome and tortured than this one, resting peacefully under a blanket of snow in the center of a hut. What a picturesque place to die, he thought, in the Latvian countryside.

_What if—?_

No. Ivan scrubbed his eyes with his hands, blotting out the corpse and the world. No, he couldn’t loot a corpse. It was wrong. Clearly, he still had some semblance of rational, normal human thought. Even the idea of it was dishonorable—

_He wouldn’t know, he’s dead_.

Ivan’s stomach growled and he curled in on himself, fingers clutching into his arms as hunger pains racked his thin body. His mind turned over.

_It had been dishonorable to kill a man in the first place. Whatever happens to him now doesn’t matter. He’s dead._

Behind the scarf that partially obscured Ivan’s face from the cold, he wet his lips. His limbs had grown stiff, they screamed when he moved them, but he crawled forward on his hands and knees until he reached the corpse. He wanted to know if this one was his. Ivan brushed away the snow on its chest to reveal glittering buttons with double-headed eagles clutching an orb and scepter on them.

He felt a dull pang in his chest as he caught sight of the golden buttons. Yes, this was one of his. He had hoped it wouldn’t be, but he knew it would be. Ivan paused for a moment and then moved his hand to the corpse’s head, gently wiping the snow from his face.

His expression was neutral. Eyes closed, mouth hanging open ever so slightly with snow on his lips. He was young. He’d probably only just turned eighteen and been called up into the army on the same day. They were prompt about that. He was tanned all over, except for nose, which was black at its tip from the cold. From the South by the looks of it. Had his heart sunk when he learned he’d be sent North to fight in the frigid cold? Had he thought of the blue seas and golden wheat fields while he lay dying for his country? For Ivan?

But it wasn’t for Ivan, was it? A war usually had some pretense of aggression. Neither the Germans nor the Austrians had aggressed against Russia. It was for somebody else. It was for the French, the British, and the Serbs that Ivan’s boys were dying. He didn’t hate the Austrians or the Germans. They were his allies when the conditions were right, just as the French and the British were his enemies when the conditions were wrong. And the Serbs were his brothers. Had this boy died for Serbia? But so were the Germans, technically speaking. Wasn’t their monarch a cousin of his monarch? And the British, too? Had this boy died in a familial dispute between crowned heads?

Why had this boy been made into a corpse? Why had millions of Russians been made into corpses? Why was Ivan sitting over his body in an abandoned hut, pawing around it for food like a starving animal if he had sacrificed millions of his own people in a war? Didn’t millions of dead mean the war should be won by now? What was the purpose of it, really?

His line of questioning and sentimentality was broken by another spasm of hunger. Ivan gritted his teeth and dropped his head. Bitterness flashed white behind his shuttered eyelids. The head upon which the crown on those buttons sat surely wanted for no food. He was off playing general from the back of a show horse sending armies of men marching into oncoming fire. Why couldn’t he play pretend like Peter III had done? They’d killed him for playing with toy soldiers, was playing war with real men better somehow?

His instincts took over. Ivan began frantically digging through the corpse’s pockets. At his breast, he found a pack of cigarettes—half-full. This wouldn’t feed Ivan, but at least he could trade them for something. At his side, a few meagre palmfuls of stale, black bread. Ivan hastened as if he’d just found gold and a man was waiting around the corner to rob him of it, greedily gnawing at a piece without abandon. He allowed himself to have only that one for now, and carefully wrapped the others in a kerchief to have later. He stored them in his pouch along with a pinch of sugar he found in the man’s other pocket.

Beneath the sugar, he felt something flat between his fingers. Ivan pulled it out and discovered the boy’s papers. He flipped them open and saw neat handwriting scrawled in cursive.

NAME: NIKITA IVANOVICH BOGDANOV

DATE OF BIRTH: 12-11-1897

HOMETOWN: STAVROPOL

Ivan held the document in his hand and stared at it. He turned it over and then flicked his eyes to the boy again, his still face, his black nose, his closed eyes with the frost on the lashes. So, he’d been right. From the South, barely eighteen. He swiped his thumb across a picture of the boy while he was still alive, eyes forward, mouth straight, face solemn.

“Nikita Ivanovich… I could have been your father with a name like that, Nikusha.”

Nikita didn’t say anything. It wasn’t as though he could hear Ivan. But maybe he was talking more to himself than anyone.

“But I suppose I already am your father, aren’t I?”

Gunshots rang out from somewhere beyond the hut. He closed his eyes and let out a dry laugh before continuing.

“I haven’t been a very good one. If I had been, you mightn’t be lying dead here, and I mightn’t be stealing your cigarettes.”

He folded the boy’s papers and kept them. He would take them to the commander and have them sent to his family. Another number, one of a million. A million Nikitas were lying across his empire—in fields, marshes, rivers—just like this one.

Ivan stood and dusted the snow off of his knees. He walked over to where the Icon of Saint Michael hung on the wall and plucked it from its string, then returned to where Nikita lay. He placed it over his chest, as if that would do something for him. He knew it wouldn’t, but that was never the point. It did something for Ivan, and that was what mattered. He pushed his scarf down, pulled one of Nikita’s cigarettes from its sleeve and lit it. He sucked the cold smoke into his lungs and then blew it out, watching as the plumes rose up and faded into nothing. It burned out to the sound of mixed Latvian and Russian voices in the distance. So, his boys had made it after all. The charge would be starting soon, Ivan needed to get back.

He stomped out his cigarette, covered his face, and walked back out into the frozen Latvian swamplands, leaving Nikita Ivanovich behind in the middle of the hut.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The Christmas Battles were fought in the Latvian swamplands between December 23-29, 1916 according to the Julian calendar, which Russia used at the time. The main troops were the Russian 12th Army against he German 8th Army. The heavy frost made it possible for the Russian troops to reach German fortifications near Riga, which had been in place since 1915. It was a surprise to the Germans, who had thought the Russians would be celebrating Orthodox Christmas.  
> 2\. By the 25th, the Russian troops had managed to achieve some success, taking around 1,000 Germans prisoner and making a 7 km gap in German lines. Except... the commander of the 12th Army did nothing with this advantage, because he hadn't expected his troops to win. Ouch.  
> 3\. While the Russian army was supplied with foodstuffs, the Russian populace at home was not. It wasn't that the Empire was producing more for them, rather, resources earmarked for civilians were now being given to troops instead. Due to German occupation of the Russian Empire's western edges and the loss of many able-bodied young men to help in the fields, the food shortages in Russia continually grew worse. This was one of the factors which would lead to the February Revolution.  
> 4\. Saint Michael is the patron saint of soldiers. In the Russian Orthodox tradition, he is known as a heavenly guardian of Russian lands.  
> 5\. "Wasn't their monarch a cousin of his monarch?" Yes, Tsar Nicolas, King Edward V, and Kaiser Wilhelm were all cousins through Queen Victoria. Royal bloodlines are a bit of a complicated mess, so I won't go into them, but check out how closely Nicolas II and Edward V resembled one another. It's striking!  
> 6\. "Why had a million Russians been made into corpses?" The Russian Empire suffered the highest numerical casualties in WWI, with around 3 million deaths between soldiers and civilians. Additionally, between 3-4 million troops were wounded in battle.  
> 7\. In reference to Nicolas playing general, that's essentially what he did. He often insisted in intervening in the minutia of government, and did the same on the battlefield, though he wasn't a good commander. Ivan's note of Peter III is also true--he was ridiculed for his hobby of playing with toy soldiers, and eventually overthrown and killed in a coup by his wife, Catherine the Great.  
> 8\. "Nikusha" is a diminutive form of Nikita.  
> 9\. Ultimately, the battle ended in a stalemate, as the Germans were able to organize a successful counterattack. In the end, they recovered about 80% of their losses. The losses the Latvian Riflemen suffered in particular led to a decrease in support for the Tsar among the Latvians.  
> 10\. "Pro Patria Mori" is a reference to a famous English poem about WWI by Wilfred Owen called "Dulce et Decorum Est". It comes from a quote by the Roman poet Horus, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori", which translates to, "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."


End file.
